NewsGator Go! Trying to Behave Nicely

September 28th, 2006

I previously posted about the news from Jason Calacanis about Weblogs Inc. making their sites render nicely on mobile devices and how this is very cool but presents a challenge for mobile clients… you can read more here and at the::unwired.

Here is what I plan to do about this in the next version of NewsGator Go!  Currently, you can turn on mobile formatting for all your feeds.  In this case, I am using Skweezer to transcode all web content external to my app  (links to the original article, links to other articles, etc).

 

Skweezing Web Pages

 

So, if I subscribe to blogs that behave nicely and render properly for mobile, the transcoding is going to jack things up.  Sites like the::unwired and Engadget get penalized for doing the right thing.   So, what I will be able to do is turn on/off transcoding at a more granular level on a feed by feed basis.  That is pretty cool.

 

Mobile formatting at the feed level

 

So, with these check boxes now in the UI it creates some extra clutter and uses valuable real estate. No worries though… just click on the “Mobile Formatting” menu option and the check boxes go bye bye.  I know this isn’t the perfect solution. The user still has to go in and enable/disable formatting at a feed level but it at least provides a valuable option. Hope this helps!

Mobile format setting
Hide feed format option

 

Entry Filed under: Mobile